


day by day

by darkmillennium (orphan_account)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Kaiba Seto Has Issues, Light Angst, Mokuba's Doing His Best, Slice of Life, mokuba's a bit isolated, seto kaiba is emotionally stunted and also a workaholic, there isn't enough mokuba in the mokuba tag and i aim to fix that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22423357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/darkmillennium
Summary: Years after the death of Gozaburo Kaiba, Mokuba still has days where he can't understand his brother's actions at all.
Relationships: Kaiba Mokuba & Kaiba Seto
Comments: 5
Kudos: 48





	day by day

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this all in one sitting and i don't even know where it came from i just really love mokuba a lot and he could use some more characterization. okay? okay. also i overuse commas way too much lololololol

Mokuba had a lot of time on his hands. 

He _shouldn’t,_ technically speaking, considering he was the vice president of a mega corporation and he also had school to attend, but his above-average intelligence had him racing through his homework the minute the teacher handed it out, and the departments he had been overseeing lately were exactly seven months and fifteen days ahead of schedule, which was unheard of and had led to all the employees of said departments enjoying ridiculously good moods. Business had been good for Kaiba Corp lately, too, as the new generation of duelists came forth and squandered the contents of their wallets in order to acquire new gear. Overall, everything was running smoothly. 

Which meant that there was nothing to _do._

Now, normally, Mokuba would kill for a little free time. Deadlines and paperwork and setbacks were exhausting on a fourteen-year-old mind, after all, and he would take any chance he could get to sit back and laugh at some cheesy superhero movie. But, sooner or later, he would run out of movies, and there were only so many single-player video games he could play before he got bored out of his mind with winning the high score over and over. He had considered visiting Yugi and his friends before remembering that it was exam season right now and deciding that he didn’t want to step foot into _that_ mess. Mokuba had never really understood what was so bad about exam season, but, then again, he supposed that dealing with running the most technologically advanced company on the planet and surviving the constant pressure of keeping up with competitors was a bit harder than sitting down to answer a hundred questions about chemistry. He wondered if he should bug Seto about letting him be privately tutored. It wasn’t like it would make a difference in his grades and his state of boredom, but having all his work in one place would certainly make it easier. Trying to budget a multi-million-dollar project in an uncomfortable school uniform in the back of a limo could make him a little annoyed, sometimes. 

As he wandered the hallways of Kaiba Corp, stopping occasionally to check in with and say hello to some of the employees in their offices, he wondered how his brother was faring. Ever the workaholic, he’d immersed himself into a project that was three months old as of right now. Mokuba had no idea what it was, only that Seto had been running himself into the ground with it and Mokuba was basically the only thing keeping him from crashing straight into a figurative wall with the overall health of his body and falling into another coma. The one after Death-T was already enough and Mokuba didn’t think he could handle another, so he’d show up in his brother’s office at least twice a day with some form of nutrition in his hands and become the world’s biggest distraction/annoyance until it had all disappeared into his brother’s mouth. Sometimes, he’d find Seto pitched over his desk, head buried in the crook of his arms as he snored softly into the desk. He never woke him, grateful for the small moments of rest that Seto seemed to refuse himself ever since that other Yugi—Atem, that was his name—disappeared in a flash of golden light. Every so often, he’d get these odd sensations of vertigo where it felt like he was the older brother instead of Seto, whenever he had to pester him to take a break for the hundredth time. 

He wasn’t the scared eleven year old he had once been, but he had a feeling Seto still saw him as such, still believed he had to bear everything himself and act like the big, strong protector that rescued Mokuba from anything and everything. 

Mokuba still hadn’t told him about the attempted kidnapping eight months ago, which no one knew about but himself. He did not think he ever would, because then his brother would spiral downwards in a vortex of self-hatred and guilt and Mokuba didn’t want to see him do that to himself. He’d already installed stronger security systems anyway. 

There wasn’t anything to do today. He briefly pondered going home and trying his hand at a new recipe he’d found online, but decided against it. It was too lonely all by himself, and making dinner for two and eating it alone would only intensify that feeling. 

Finally, he arrived at his brother’s office. When he opened the door without knocking, as usual, Seto didn’t look up, only giving a slight _hmm_ of acknowledgement that he was there. That was normal. Mokuba could do normal. 

He pulled up a chair on the side of the desk and sat down, close enough to be near to his brother but far enough away that he couldn’t tell what he was doing. Seto would reveal his top-secret workings in due time, as he always did, and it was sure to be something that would blow the company away. It wouldn’t be a project of Seto Kaiba’s if it didn’t. 

Pulling out his phone, Mokuba absentmindedly began looking over the most recent analytics of the stock market. There was no change, and he hadn’t expected there to be any, but he needed something to do with his hands, and eventually he switched over to a mind-numbing crossword puzzle app that would at least keep him occupied for an hour. 

Eventually, he grew stiff. His eyes were twitchy and strained from staring at the screen, and his body popped in a way that it shouldn’t at age fourteen when he turned off his phone and stretched in a multitude of directions in order to get his blood flowing. Raising his eyes to check on the state of his brother, he nearly jumped out of his chair when he found Seto’s icy blue eyes trained directly on him. Mokuba couldn’t quite place the emotion he saw in them, but it almost seemed like his brother was analyzing him. For what purpose, he didn’t know. The two held eye contact for a few minutes before Mokuba finally decided to speak up. 

“Seto?” 

“Hmm?” 

“You okay?”

Seto gave him a slightly exasperated, slightly annoyed look, the one that said _don’t ask stupid questions_ that would shut up anyone but Mokuba because whenever Seto pointed that look at Mokuba he never actually _meant_ it. It took the place of the odd, scrutinizing look from before, which made Mokuba relax a little into his chair. That look was new, and Mokuba wasn’t so sure what to do with _new._

The silence was a little more comfortable after that, though Mokuba noted with some interest that Seto’s typing was a whole lot less frantic than it had been earlier. Maybe he was done? 

Sure enough, when he tilted his head just enough to see the glare of the laptop screen, it was open on an email draft and not any sort of algorithms. He watched the words form sentences across the screen, feeling his eyesight dull just the smallest bit as he lost himself in the familiar _clack-clack-clack_ of fingers on keys. He was jolted out of his reverie, however, when Seto suddenly shut the laptop abruptly and tucked it into his suitcase. 

Mokuba frowned, checking his phone. It was only 8:30. There was no way Seto was done yet, not with his project and certainly not with his other obligations. 

“Do you have everything done?” Seto’s voice was neutral, indicating nothing out of the ordinary, but Mokuba felt nothing but unbalanced, nodding in agreement as Seto moved for the door. When he didn’t follow immediately, Seto looked back at him with a raised eyebrow, and his body moved of its own accord as it had when it was five to dutifully follow him out the door and down the hallway. Looks like he hadn’t outgrown his brother’s sway over him yet, but with each day he knew he was getting there. 

“Where are we going?” he increased his speed just a little bit to walk at his brother’s side, which wasn’t as fast as he remembered it being. Had his legs grown, or had Seto just gotten slower from exhaustion? He didn’t know the answer. 

Seto looked at him in muted, but honest, surprise, as if the answer to his question was obvious. “Home.”

“This early?” 

“Everything’s done for the day.”

Mokuba had to keep from gaping. Since when did his brother work on a day-to-day basis? Normally he tried to fit a _year’s_ worth of work into twelve hours, and then went home at two in the morning irritated because he was three minutes behind! 

The drive back to their mansion was quiet, as most things seemed to be nowadays, and when they finally crossed the threshold of their front door, Mokuba was unsure of where the night was progressing. This was entirely out of the norm, and he felt that he had reason to be concerned, since the last time things had been out of the norm there had been way too many freaky magic things happening for his liking. 

Hopefully, his brother wasn’t possessed. He didn’t think he had the energy for that tonight. 

Instead, Seto walked up the stairs to his room, presumably to drop off his briefcase, and Mokuba made his way to the main entertainment room to see if anyone had beaten his main score in his most recent favorite game. He doubted it, but he wasn’t above setting a new record so that other players of the game would glance despairingly at the scoreboard and give up entirely on trying to beat him.

Just as he was reaching for the controller, the opening of the door behind him made him turn around in surprise. There stood Seto, looking some mixture of hopeful and slightly uncomfortable, holding...a chess board.

“I thought we could maybe...play a game together?” The words were foreign, stilted, like trying to speak a language that he’d long forgotten, but Mokuba felt his mouth curl into a smile that he wouldn’t have tried to stop even if he could. 

He saw a rare, slight smile form on the normally-scowling face of his brother, and, for a second, they were the children at the orphanage again, just Seto and Mokuba without the name Kaiba and all the heaviness that came with it.

**Author's Note:**

> lemme know what u think??? pls??? seto's weird to try and portray


End file.
